


The Wit and Wisdom of their King

by zygodidactyl



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Speculation, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Pride
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:02:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26537002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zygodidactyl/pseuds/zygodidactyl
Summary: The First Resurrection doesn't quite go as planned.  Turns out, inventing necromancy and restarting a whole planet is pretty hard.  Who knew?
Comments: 6
Kudos: 35





	The Wit and Wisdom of their King

**Author's Note:**

> For the People's Tomb fandom jam! Prompt was 'Pride.' 
> 
> Title from The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe. Because what was I supposed to do not take that Annabel Lee reference and run?

  
  


_(This--all this--was in the olden_

_Time long ago)_

A myriad ago, before Dominicus had a name, a young man stood in his bedroom and decided to save the world. 

Things...didn’t go as planned. 

See, the thing nobody tells you about single-handedly creating a new science so advanced as to call it magic is that it’s really fucking hard. It's all work work work, a side job as the kooky barista because nobody else will hire you, and the end result might still be a planet full of corpses in stasis and one freshly minted necromancer with all the death juice for what he needed to do and absolutely none of the skill. 

The only living human on the former planet Earth soon realized that resurrecting animals wasn’t so hard. Only a few dozen shuddering zombie rats and he had the technique down cold. For rodents. And this was the point where any respectable mad(diningly handsome) scientist would make himself some sort of horrible cat-rat hybrid, and any normal researcher would begin trials on more complicated animals. Maybe even a few dozen rigorous pre-post treatment behavioral studies, just to be sure, before he tried it on an actual human being. 

But hey, God’s dead and so’s IRB approval. Also, nobody was even around to care and you can really only go up from ‘lifeless undecaying corpse party’. Nothing makes for reckless experimentation quite like complete and total isolation after all, and John didn’t even have a plucky German Shepherd to get all attached to. So, instead of being responsible, John Gaius packed his notebooks, a change of clothes, and his favorite pen, and set out to find the perfect candidate for his first resurrection.

He passed dozens of dusty corpses on the way out of town, and continued to pass them by the countryside. Technically, any one of them would have done just fine as a guinea pig, but fine wasn’t _perfect._ (Perfect, here, if asked in the years to come would mean fitting any number of technical and impressive necromantic criteria. In the moment, it really just meant fitting a certain flair for the dramatic.)

One week, two days, 14 hours and a sunburn into the pilgrimage, he finally spotted something promising. A single spire poked up over the horizon, proud and tall in the late afternoon sun. It looked like something out of a movie, an establishing shot of a beautiful seaside palace artistically framed in salt water spraying up from the cliffs. Real awards bait.

The remainder of the hike over took longer than expected, and the image had grayed out by the time John arrived. As had become apparent fairly quickly, the tower wasn’t the top of a grand castle, just a humble stone lighthouse. Even the mood lighting was gone now that the sun had set, and the majestic saline spray just chased him inside and out of the rapidly chilling nighttime air. 

What happened next would never be entirely clear. In some tellings she was just inside the door, or draped on the stairs, and in one particularly blasphemous text alluringly placed on the bed. (All mention of the contents of the Tomb were banned after that fiasco.) Reality, as usual, was more interesting and less cinematic. 

The woman who would be called Alecto had probably died just before or just after a long shift. She was still in pajamas that clearly hadn’t been washed in some time even before the dying, and her hair sprang about in the humidity like a child’s drawing of a stormcloud. A chipped mug sat next to her head, though the contents had long since turned to mold and dust. At her feet, a tiny patch of moss had sprung up in the place where her open mouth had managed to drool through the stasis-death, a tiny patch of life resisting the siren’s call of death and decay.

She was perfect.

And maybe if things had gone just a little differently it would have stayed that way. 

But the divine patience of the Emperor Undying would be learned later, much much later, and right now the would-be savior and scourge of the universe was just lonely. He was tired of bringing back rats and rabbits and an odd cow, and most of all he was tired of having nobody to share all that with. Even the people who mocked him were at least paying attention to his ideas, and now they were on hold with everything else. He wanted, bluntly, to show off. 

The theorem was long and difficult, fishing a consciousness out of stilled meat and bone. John might have guessed this if he’d thought about it, but humans were more difficult than the rats. It wasn’t just pumping blood and simple synapses, joints and an immune system, there was something more to a person. He supposed those more religiously inclined would call it a soul. And replacing a soul was fucking hard. Who knew?

The woman’s body was animated again, breathing and everything, that part had been the same as the rats, but still something was just _missing_ John could feel it. Blood sweat ran down his face in sticky rivers as he simultaneously held her body in life and fished around for that missing piece. He couldn’t stop the process now, aborting mid-theorem would just leave her a zombified shell. The mice hadn’t, ah, lasted very long like that. 

And then, all of the sudden, she was full. 

A great... _something_ rushed past in that strange necromantic liminal space and then the body in front of him felt, well, different. Fuller and more complete, like a tiny sun had suddenly taken residence between her ribs and started a fission reaction. It was wonderful, strange and powerful all at once and nothing like the rodents had been. 

“Oh,” he said, voice shaking slightly after the strain and the sheer thrilling rush. “I guess I just had to...hold the door open.” John chuckled and wiped, well smeared, the blood off his face. The woman stirred and mumbled softly as he fixed himself up, her limbs twitching in sequence as if testing all of them. Booting up, as the old tecchies would say.

She hissed in pain and pressed a hand to her eyes, like she’d opened them too quickly and been burned by the dim lighting. John squatted down to her level and held a hand out to introduce himself for the first time. “Hey there,” he said, “I’m J-- _oh.”_

The woman had startled and turned to face him as soon as he spoke, her eyes snapping wide open and her other hand ripping the mug from it’s neat spot on the table. And her eyes were wrong. Perfect black from corner to corner, with just a thin ring of white where an iris might have once been. The effect was disorienting, hard to tell where or what she was looking at, and harder to tear the gaze away. Clearly something had gone very, very wrong.

Something must have been wrong with John too because despite that, he found he wasn’t the slightest bit afraid. Whatever he had done to this stranger, it had the particular allure of a first draft and all its rough and bloodied edges. He loved it like he’d loved his first zombie rats and the horrible way they tried to skitter across the floor with one limb and half a brain functioning. He had done something new, after all, done the thing man had been striving for since the first cooking fire. John Gaius had beaten death, and sure maybe this first victory hadn’t been a clean one but it would all come out in the wash. They’d crack it, he and his new disciple, and the world would be reborn. Great men, after all, rarely stop to think.

He rallied himself, and straightened his bent elbow back out with a snap.

“Hi there,” God said with pride. “I’m John.”


End file.
